#singular

In a future time when most human thought has been accelerated by artificial intelligence and external memory can be shared on a universal matrix... GITS 2 ↗

— Masaki Yamada

#singularity #intelligence

A blank wall of social and professional antagonism faces the woman physician that forms a situation of singular and painful loneliness, leaving her without support, respect or professional counsel. ↗

— Elizabeth Blackwell

#blank #counsel #faces #forms #her

I have a secret thought from some things I have observed, that God may perhaps design you for some singular service in the world. ↗

— David Brainerd

#god #i #may #observed #perhaps

Whether you listen to a piece of music, or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug, or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own. ↗

— Basil Bunting

#common #jug #kind #listen #look

A modern civilization is only possible when it is accepted that singular beings exist and express themselves freely. ↗

— Tahar Ben Jelloun

#beings #civilization #exist #express #freely

We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living. ↗

— Rem Koolhaas

#best #cities #context #create #desired

The intentions of the cybernetic totalist tribe are good. They are simply following a path that was blazed in earlier times by well-meaning Freudians and Marxists - and I don't mean that in a pejorative way. I'm thinking of the earliest incarnations of Marxism, for instance, before Stalinism and Maoism killed millions. Movements associated with Freud and Marx both claimed foundations in rationality and the scientific understanding of the world. Both perceived themselves to be at war with the weird, manipulative fantasies of religions. And yet both invented their own fantasies that were just as weird. The same thing is happening again. A self-proclaimed materialist movement that attempts to base itself on science starts to look like a religion rather quickly. It soon presents its own eschatology and its own revelations about what is really going on - portentous events that no one but the initiated can appreciate. The Singularity and the noosphere, the idea that a collective consciousness emerges from all the users on the web, echo Marxist social determinism and Freud's calculus of perversions. We rush ahead of skeptical, scientific inquiry at our peril, just like the Marxists and Freudians. ↗

— Jaron Lanier

#freud #freudians #internet #marx #marxism

Acting isn't a singular profession, it is a collaborate profession. ↗

— Edie McClurg

#collaborate #profession #singular

Losing faith in your own singularity is the start of wisdom, I suppose; also the first announcement of death. ↗

— Peter Conrad

#announcement #death #faith #first #i

To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect. ↗

— Joan Didion

#back #expectations #free #give #great